


Trouble Man (It's Been A Long, Long Time)

by Kian



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Disjointed Point of View, Implied Relationships, Multi, PTSD, Past Torture, Steve Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-10
Updated: 2014-05-10
Packaged: 2018-01-24 05:10:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1592780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kian/pseuds/Kian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He thinks, sometimes, that the people around him forget how recent the past is for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trouble Man (It's Been A Long, Long Time)

**Author's Note:**

> This...is a thing that I have spent the last twenty four hours pulling out of me piece by piece. It is entirely imperfect, but I kind of like it that way.
> 
> The relationships are as implied as you want them to be, but the overall headcanon for this fic puts Steve Rogers in a sort of besotted, sweet love with Peggy Carter and in the kind of love with Bucky Barnes that might drive a man to blow up Hydra over it -- three times.
> 
> Unbeta-ed. Spelling, grammatical, and any historical inaccuracies should be reported to the front desk. Otherwise, enjoy?

He thinks, sometimes, that the people around him forget how _recent_ the past is for him.

“Ancient history,” as Tony calls his own father’s youth, was just months ago to Steve. When he’d been thawed out, they all acted as though he’d been resurrected, like there was a clear, thick line between “then” and “now.” Like Steve had been in any way aware of the yawning gap of lost time between crashing Hydra’s plane into the Arctic and waking up in New York seventy-odd years later.

There wasn’t. Not for him, at least.

One moment he’d been talking to Peggy, making promises he couldn’t keep, and then the crash, the pain, the choking cold and darkness, and closing his eyes that last moment on a prayer for forgiveness and peace and that their sacrifices — the Allies’, the troops’, the Howling Commandos’, his and Bucky’s — would be enough. And that last second, that last clear thought that he’d be with Bucky again, a plea and a hope and a comfort as he slipped helplessly into the black.

And then he’d blinked awake to sunlight, warmth, and a confusing degree of calm. He’d tried to understand — heaven? where’s Bucky then? — and his mind hooked on the words coming from the radio.

He’d watched that game. Bucky’d never told him how he’d gotten the tickets up in the cheap seats, but they’d made a day of it then and it stuck out in his memory like a shaft of light in the haze of his bemusement. He recognized the scenario of the announcer’s enthusiastic play-by-play with the unerring certainty only a live witness could command. It might have convinced him about his location relative to heaven — favorite memories seemed a likely foundation for Paradise when dealing with a kid from Brooklyn who’d only seen bigger and grander things when they were half-destroyed in wartime — but...his shoes were on the bed.

And why was he listening to the game when he should be there, with Bucky up in the stands, whooping and laughing (he’d been coughing for hours afterward, but the smile had stuck right on through until he’d collapsed in his bed that night), hugging and grappling like loons in their excitement?

No. Something was strange here.

The door opposite his bed had opened and a poor imitation of Peggy had walked through. But it was a very poor imitation, and there were things that didn’t make sense about her at all. Her clothes looked a bit odd — the fabric too thin, too strangely textured; the shoulders unsquared by shoulder pads; the skirt cut similarly but too tightly across the hips; the tie too wide and too short and too long all at once. And her hair and makeup too...something. Her victory curls not as tight, her brows thin and severe, her lipstick too dark. Her gait was more swagger than a stroll. Her speech was even a bit strange — American sounding, sure, but not an accent quite like he’d ever heard before.

And, no stockings? He knew the war effort had meant most civilian ladies went without, but he’d thought they were part of the uniform in the SSR? Cotton or wool ones, at least — though the girls in the chorus line had always complained that those sagged something awful. Still, Peggy had always been perfectly put together, top to toe in regs looking sharper and smarter than anyone else could hope to, even in the field.

He’d opened his eyes from 1945 and he’d found himself seventy years in the future. Just like that. A blink and the whole world had aged and warped and turned into something that looked a bit the same on the surface, so long as he didn’t pay attention to any of the details.

But two months ago, he’d been on the Western Front. A bare week before opening his eyes in New York, he’d been told they couldn’t spare the resources (him) and men (the Howling Commandos) to recover Bucky’s body. He’d had C-rations sandwiched between Dum Dum and Morita while poring over a maps of the Alps one morning, and the next, a man in a black coat with an eyepatch was indelicately breaking it to him that the blinking, blaring chaos of life all around him was New York City — Times Square — and that there weren’t any Howling Commandos waiting for him in this new place, nor was there anyone else. Steve had blinked away everyone and everything he knew.

 

* * *

 

Steve wonders more than once if he’d been sent down instead of up. It’s a more comforting thought than it should be: Bucky’s not here, after all, and Steve could take being in hell so long as Bucky could get into heaven. His best friend deserved as much for what reward he’d earned following Steve headlong into danger his whole life.

His life “before” is more real to him than where he’s ended up in the now. How could a handful of months, suddenly thrust into downtime as an outdated relic while still in the prime of his life, be more real than everything he’d ever known? The loneliness is as oppressive as the sense of impotence; he can’t even go say hello to his old neighbors and acquaintances, can’t “catch up” with the handful of ninety-somethings whose memory of him is as dim and fogged up with their full lives as his of them is clear and painfully fresh.

But all of that could be so much easier to shoulder, he thinks, if he’d been able to look back and see that he’d done right by his best friend. He would have lost Bucky anyway, if he’d caught him before he fell from the train, but Bucky would have had a life, a good life probably, and could have died of old age in his bed surrounded by people who loved him. Not alone, in the cold, body left to the scavengers.

Steve dreams at night. Of grazing Bucky’s fingers with his own, before his arm shrinks back to its old size and is of no use to anyone as the railing gives way, Steve too short and weak to save his best friend. Of being unable to move at all when he sees Bucky blown from the train, just hearing him scream for help over and over until the wind screams louder. Of defying orders and knocking out the detail assigned to escort him back to bombed out London, making his desperate way into the cold of the mountains to find trails of blood in the snow and a desecrated corpse that looks at him with wide, accusing eyes, tear tracks frozen across a ruined face.

He doesn’t wake up screaming, but that is only because he doesn’t wake up breathing.

He knows his sins better than anyone. They are half of the reason he lets S.H.I.E.L.D. keep him. And keep him they do. His apartment, his bike, his bank account, the nostalgic hints around every corner of the facilities they make available to him. He hasn’t felt this much like a performing monkey since he punched Adolf Hitler for a living.

He gives himself a routine, keeps himself primed and ready for service, studies his new reality dispassionately and learns as many of its rules as he can. But he can’t help how scraped out he feels, how he turns to speak to people who aren’t there, how he finds himself looking for anything that feels the way it should. How, when he can’t find those things, he chases down what’s left of his life and puts together the most heartrending puzzles of his own fable, as told by those who’d seen him as human only yesterday.

 

* * *

 

Fighting a man they call Loki in a German square feels like peeling away a scab from a fresh wound. The man talks like Schmidt. Fights like him too, haughty and strong and cruel. For all that this Loki can do things Schmidt must have only dreamed of, it feels a bit like coming home.

Howard’s son — full grown and twice as full of bluster and boasting — rubs him the wrong way from the start, and he barely has time to deal with the idea of _Howard_ settling down, having a mouthy kid, and said mouthy kid being _older_ than Steve, before people start appearing out of midair with hammers and capes and suddenly things start to seem, if not _normal_ — nothing has been normal since the night at the Stark Expo anyway, not really — then manageable in a way nothing else about this new century has been so far.

There are men who act like gods, and men that shake the room with their shadows, and men who follow orders, and women who both do and do not. If he ignores the details, it’s just like being in the army again, back on the front lines fighting Hydra and Nazis, and he can feel himself settling back into his role as Captain Rogers, CO of the Howling Commandos.

Except these people fight him every step of the way, their loyalty not easily earned — Tony especially — and it rattles what little grip he has on the situation. Howard hadn’t been one of his men — Peggy either — but they’d gotten along a lot better than _this_ with lives on the line. And Colonel Phillips had never been an easy man, but he’d learned to trust Steve’s judgment and work _with_ him rather than push him around as he saw fit. Steve gives Tony’s instincts the benefit of his doubt in S.H.I.E.L.D. — because Tony is as much like Howard as he isn’t, and Steve is half convinced from watching him that Tony might have outshined his father’s brilliance by a few shades — and Fury comes up wanting. Suddenly, he feels a lot less like Captain Rogers and a lot more like that dress-up doll, Captain America.

Then, the one person left who still believes in _that_ Captain America is gone. Blood spilled on paper and broken promises and a new layer of guilt entirely unique to the world he’s found himself in. A group of broken people scattered to the wind, specialized and willing to fight against something, but not united to a single mission.

 

* * *

 

Steve trails after Tony because he hasn’t yet gone to war without a Stark in his corner, and he’ll take the infuriating Stark he has on hand over a weapons cache of Hydra tech any day of the week. It helps, in a bitter sort of way, that Tony doesn’t treat him like a hero, or a symbol, or a saint. Steve hasn’t slept through a night since 1945 and he gets the feeling that Tony Stark is in much the same boat which means that, though Howard’s kid is a cheeky little brat, Steve can respect his grief. He doesn’t like how Tony resents Coulson’s bravery, not with Peggy’s reprimand to respect Bucky’s choice still ringing fresh in his own ear, but Tony calls him “Cap,” and the irreverence begins feels to feel like something familiar, something Steve can work with.

And they make a good enough team when all’s said and done. A strange sort of unit and one that breaks up as soon as their work is finished, but there is a respect there now. Steve has found people who don’t look at him like a relic, but as a living, breathing person, and though he sees them more often in the news or in briefings than in person, he allows himself a bit of comfort that to some people in the world, he is still _real_.

Even if he still feels like Dorothy settling into Oz. Even if he finally gives in and moves to D.C., leaving behind Brooklyn and its paved-over ghosts. Even if he still finds himself doing bag work in the middle of the night until the sun starts to crawl up the horizon and he can run the footpaths around the city like people do in droves now. Even if Peggy doesn’t remember he exists in the here and now from visit to visit. Even if it’s his face plastered all over a museum exhibit, the voice over talking about him in a reverential past tense. Even if he stares at the uniform on Bucky’s mannequin and tries to convince himself it isn’t a carefully rendered recreation. Even if watching himself in the old reels guts him, the memory of the cameraman pointing a lens at him fresh enough in his memory that he knows exactly what joke he and Bucky had been chortling over on the other side of time. Even if he doesn’t feel real most days, there are people to whom he still is _real_ and he tries to live up to and into that.

 

* * *

 

The day he realizes the balance of wishing he’d died in the crash has finally tipped towards something he can joke about with Natasha, he calls the directress at the Smithsonian Air & Space museum and finally allows her to make those scans of his sketchbooks into an installation in the exhibit she’s been nagging after him over. Only the landscape sketches and a few of the maps he’d freehanded for expediency’s sake while on mission, though. He’s not ready for the world to see how he saw the people in his life, though he knows those are the sketches she’d really like to get her hands on. It’s bad enough they’d sorted through and divided up everything he’d owned after he’d gone down. Peggy and Howard had tucked away all the truly personal items — most of his sketchbooks for instance — but that didn’t mean everything had been safe from prying eyes. It’s only thanks to his friends that he had any secrets left at all.

He knows he does because Natasha starts trying to set him up on dates. Natasha must know about Peggy — the whole _world_ seemed to know about Peggy to some extent, why else would S.H.I.E.L.D. try to ease him into modern life by imitating her at his bedside? They’d thought she was his “type,” and they hadn’t been wrong. Not exactly. But Peggy, for all that she was beautiful, was his type for reasons she herself must have known and made peace with. His type was as much brunette as it was backbone, as much élan as it was a lovely face.

A little over a year wasn’t long enough to have mended his twin heartbreak, and while he had learned to flirt and politely charm in his years as Captain America, he has yet to learn how to teach his heart how to be disloyal. And courting — _dating_ — someone else while he still aches, while he still gets angry with Natasha for not being honest with him on missions when he treats her like —

No. No, there is no one now who he can depend on like that. Not in S.H.I.E.L.D., anyway. Fury’s making it more clear by the day that Steve’s sensibilities chafe against S.H.I.E.L.D.’s bottom line. But Steve has already broken more promises in his life than he’s comfortable with, and his whole existence in this time and place is because he made a promise to a humble man who had had the power to forge superhumans that he wouldn’t let might overcome right. Even if Fury finds that sort of thing trite and impractical, Steve has nothing if he doesn’t have the strength of his convictions.

 

* * *

 

He takes a shine to Sam because Sam treats him like he’s real, but also like he’s alive. Like his life is that straight, short line that Steve experienced and not the meandering path of how history reconciles his interrupted lifetime. Sam might be the only one, besides Natasha and Clint, who suggests modern history to him like he’s been away on a tour of duty and not as though they can’t fathom being out of touch with the rapidly changing scenery of culture and counter-culture. Sam talks to him like a fellow soldier, and not like an idol. He teases him for being able to _be_ an idol, the way Bucky and the Commandos used to. Steve gravitates to it like a life preserver tossed out on a choppy sea.

He thinks he might talk to Sam, after watching the meeting for veterans, after hearing how Sam lost Riley and how painfully familiar “up there just to watch” sounds. He’s collecting what he wants to say on his drive back to his apartment, how he wants to talk about the loneliness and the frustration and how he can’t sleep for seeing Bucky every time he closes his eyes.

The thought of being able to share — of being able to find a way to heal, maybe even move on from this life dancing to Nick Fury’s tune — is promising, so much so that he gives flirting with his pretty neighbor a try. Just a little bit, nothing too forward. Enough to maybe give himself a first little push out of everyone else’s “ancient history” and fully into a world he has no choice but to live in.

Her mild encouragement to try again another time is forgotten as soon as she says his records were left on. He’s a boy from Brooklyn who spent the last decade of his life — before waking up in an entirely different century — living on what he and Bucky could scrape together. He doesn’t leave electricity running anymore than he leaves the tap to drip or wastes food. It took him months to resign himself to having a refrigerator that constantly ran, for Pete’s sake.

And then, of course, it is reaffirmed for him that no one and nothing is what it seems. Not Fury, not his pretty neighbor, not Rumlow, not Natasha, not Pierce, not S.H.I.E.L.D., and not even his own death.

(Not Sam either, but Sam’s secrets are the kind that soldiers keep to give themselves something to rib each other over and not the kind everyone else in this time seems carry, almost as though they are all determined to compound his despair.)

Hydra is the same as ever. Sitwell’s confession confirms every reservation Steve has ever had about Fury’s propensity to get himself into arms races with shadows, and gives them very little time to do anything at all about it.

 

* * *

 

Time.

Time was, he would have known Bucky anywhere. Time was, even drugged to the gills and half out of his mind from pain, Bucky would have known Steve too.

So very little time gone by in Steve’s experience since then, but Natasha had said the “Winter Soldier” had a reputation of fifty years.

Fifty years is evidently enough time to say, “Who the hell is Bucky?”

 

* * *

 

The last time Steve Rogers had felt like burning the world down around him, he had driven through the front door of Schmidt’s Alpine fortress and destroyed the Red Skull’s ambitions in a fiery path of destruction that reached halfway around the world and had only stopped when he had deliberately crashed himself down into one of the most desolate places on earth.

This time, he routs one Nicholas J. Fury from his throne of half-truths and superior firepower with prejudice, and determines on a similarly grim course of action: bring S.H.I.E.L.D. and its “beautiful parasite” thrashing and screeching into the light of day, reducing as much of its treacherous network to ash as he could possibly manage.

He is well acquainted with the litany of his own sins, and wrath is numbered among them.

For two years, while he had believed that his friend’s death was his own fault and ignoble and poorly honored when he was not able to do so much as retrieve his body, he had also believed Bucky’s suffering had been at an end. He was only ever able to breath again, in the middle of the night when another of his dreams shakes him loose, on the thought that while he serves out his time here, his Bucky was eternally out of the reach of pain and torment.

It had never once occurred to Steve that what Zola had begun in Italy with Bucky strapped to his table might ever conceivably be picked up again. He can’t bring himself to think too long about what signs he might have missed, how he’d been right all along to blame himself for not going back for Bucky, how he’d been asleep for seventy years while Hydra —

He can’t think about it, but he _feels_ it, an overwhelming and all-consuming rage that he quickly refines into the sort of focus and determination he can use. Even Sam can’t reach him, because even Sam still underestimates how very close the past is for Steve. All the closer while Bucky breathes, because — and how could he have forgotten this so quickly? — where one goes, the other will always follow. It was a promise they never had to make aloud, and it is a promise Steve will finally be able to keep.

Let Hydra, let S.H.I.E.L.D., let all of them burn in the hell they had awakened him to.

Steve Rogers was coming for Bucky Barnes.

 

* * *

 

The uniform fits, and Captain America does his duty.

Captain Rogers musters troops and, having sent out his call to arms, sets out on a mission with new Commandos at his six and a whole world to protect riding on his squared shoulders.

And Steve Rogers waits for the magnet that beats in his chest to pull its match back home. 

 

* * *

 

“Don’t make me do this.” 

 

* * *

 

Three slugs and he thinks that’s probably fair. Steve’s failed Bucky three times in their lives, and Bucky deserves his pound of flesh. 

 

* * *

 

“You’re my friend.”

“You’re my mission.”

He gives himself over to Bucky, to whatever fate Bucky decides is best for Steve Rogers. Bucky’s always done right by him. 

 

* * *

 

Bucky’s face is filled with a terror Steve wishes he had the power to wipe away with gentle hands. But his mighty strength is leaching out, and so he tries to soothe the fear he sees in that beloved face with the only promise he has left to give.

“...because I’m with you to the end of the line.”

He sinks and sinks and sinks and Bucky’s hand pulls him to his feet and wipes his brow and asks him what he means by getting into fights when he’s as sick as a dog.

He closes his eyes knowing Bucky will get him home safe and sound.

 

* * *

 

The relief of seeing Sam beside him in the hospital is a bit heady. Unless his friend ages very, _very_ well, Steve’s latest brush with death hasn’t propelled him most of another century into the future.

Which is good since Captain America’s on vacation, effective immediately.

Steve Rogers has got things to do and he thinks he might need all the time he can get.

 

* * *

 

 

 


End file.
